I have a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster being backed up with BE 2012. I have individual backup jobs created for all virtual machines on a single Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) in the cluster, so that the Hyper-V snapshot backups of the virtual machines stay serialized per volume. So CSV1 may have 5-6 virtual machines running on it, and all those virtual machines are backed up via one backup job in BE to prevent multiple jobs from trying to do different snapshots of the same volume at the same time and causing the backups to fail.

On each CSV there is a mix of both Windows and Linux VMs being backed up in the same job. We do weekly full backups and nightly incrementals. Backup Exec 2012 does not support incremental/differential backups of the Linux VM's, and by default BE falls back to a full backup of these Linux VMs instead, but we don't want to do nightly full backups of these Linux VMs as there's too much data for us to do a full backup every night. We have decided that for our Linux VMs that weekly full backups are sufficient and that we can skip the nightly incrementals.

I can get BE to skip the nightly incremental backups of the Linux VMs by unchecking the option "Use the full backup method for virtual machines that do not support incremental or differential backups" but then BE reports every backup job as failed (red) every single night with the error "V-79-57344-38324 - Incremental\\Differential backup methods are not supported for this VM. The backup job failed, since the option 'to fall back to a full backup' was not selected." This is really annoying because all jobs are red I have to check every single backup job every night to make sure that the reason it failed wasn't due to another problem.

So is there a way to exclude these Linux VM's from just incremental backups so the backup jobs report either completed successfully or completed with exceptions? I need to keep incremental backups running on the Windows VMs in the same job, I can't create a separate backup job for just the Linux VMs while still maintaining serialized backups on the volume, and I also cannot move all the Linux VMs to their own separate volume isolated away from the Windows VMs.